Natasha Wimmer on Mexican Crime Fiction

Beautiful synchrony! The editor of the current volume of TWO LINES segue ways into next year's volume of TWO LINES.

Current TWO LINES editor Natasha Wimmer--who did a beautiful job on Some Kind of Beautiful Signal with Jeffrey Yang--has a great article in The Nation about Mexican crime fiction. And international noir will in fact be the theme of the special folio at the back of next year's volume of TWO LINES. (And if you're a translatior, submissions are still open till Dec. 1.)

And here's Wimmer on some Mexican noir:

And yet Martín Solares's first novel, The Black Minutes, an uncommonly nuanced neo-noir—set, as it happens, in Tamaulipas—may be exactly the right book to read at the end of 2010, a particularly dark year in recent Mexican history. It's crime fiction, but it's also a meditation on corruption, and it captures the kind of nightmarish helplessness that many feel in the face of the tide of narco-violence sweeping the north of Mexico. In Tamaulipas alone, assassinations since June include the front-runner candidate for governor of the state and two mayors of a single small town over the course of two weeks. On September 19, after the killing of a photography intern, the Ciudad Juárez paper El Diario ran an extraordinary editorial asking the drug gangs for instruction: "We want you to explain to us what...we are supposed to publish or not publish.... You are at this time the de facto authorities in this city." Scraping away some of the cool remove of the traditional noir, The Black Minutes gives a gorgeous, suffocating sense of life in Mexico's sweltering northeast and an equally smothering sense of a justice system in which the concept of justice has been leached of meaning.